Published Quarterly by Lifeloom.com

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott

Fall 2004 Volume II issue 2

             When I was a full-time prison chaplain with the Florida Department of Corrections, the assistant warden of programs and I were summoned to regional office for a meeting with the director—something that only happened twice during my seven years with the department. In the meeting, we (along with the other chaplains and assistant wardens of our region) were told that a traveling evangelist and his family were going to be doing a tour of our region, conducting services in each of our chapels along the way. Nothing odd in that exactly—except each of us normally scheduled the programs for our own chapels.

             So why were we called? What was the purpose? Surely for more than just coordination. There had to be a better reason than that to pull all of us out of our institutions for most of a day. There was. And when he told us, I was stunned. The evangelist’s family included an adopted daughter who was still a small child, and she would be coming in with his other daughters, many of whom were very young also, and his wife, in order to sing during his service.

             No wonder the regional director called us in to tell us this in person and all at once. If I had received the information in a memo, I would have thought it was a mistake, a typo. Minors can’t come into the prison. It’s too dangerous. It subjects them to objectification and worse by child molesters and murderers—especially if they’re performing. I and others expressed these concerns, but discovered very quickly that we had not gathered for a discussion. We were being told, not asked, to make this happen. After enough security concerns were voiced, it was agreed that the little girl would go into the chaplain’s office with her mother after singing and remained locked in until the end of the service when she would return to the stage and sing another song.

             The family was white, the adopted daughter black. The majority of the prison population who attended services in the chapel were black. The evangelist said how much it meant to the men that he had adopted a little black girl. I felt the child was being exploited. I felt the entire event was explosive. And I wondered if those making the decisions were just too far removed from the inmate population to realize what they were doing, or if my capacity as a confessor and counselor gave me a heightened sense of what goes on in the hearts and mind of inmates. Either way it bothered me more than any other single situation I encountered during my time inside.

             Driving back to our institution, the assistant warden said, "You just got the idea for your next book, didn’t you?"

             I had. The result: Blood of the Lamb, the second John Jordan mystery.

             Some things you just can’t fake. Sure, Power in the Blood and Blood of the Lamb are novels, fictional stories created from my imagination. But it’s my experiences as a prison chaplain, my intimate knowledge of inmates and officers, that becomes the raw material my imagination uses, and I think it’s the underlying experience and insight that makes the final product of imagination true and credible. I believe that fiction should tell the truth, that novels should be as accurate as possible. This means I believe in research—even when a story requires going to prison to do it.

Copyright 2004 by Michael Lister

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott